Samsung 970 EVO Review (500GB)

The New M.2 NVMe Price/Performance Champ

Nearly two years ago, Samsung launched their Samsung 960 PRO and 960 EVO to major fanfare. These two juggernaut introductions in addition to their enterprise cousins further established Samsung’s position as the undisputed leader in M.2 form-factor NVMe SSDs. At the time, the industry had been facing a massive shortage of NAND which slowed down product introductions across the board, but as NAND supply has finally begun stabilizing, companies are now finally introducing some new products to once again reignite demand.

Recently, Samsung launched the Samsung 970 EVO and the Samsung 970 PRO which will replace the aging Samsung 960 [...]

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December 26, 2017

The Best Black Friday 2017 Deals [Expired]

For all the readers living in the United States, Happy Thanksgiving! Hope you get all the food, drink and of course plenty of Black Friday shopping after!

Today and for the next 48 hours, we’ll be scouring the internet for the best Black Friday deals on technology, computer hardware, and other generally awesome deals you may want to check out. We’ll keep this post updated with all the latest deals, so check back often!

MSI Releases Small Form Factor Vortex G25 Gaming Desktop

MSI recently announced the Vortex G25, a small yet powerful gaming PC.

The MSI Vortex G25 is absolutely tiny. It’s slim build is almost reminiscent of a blade server. When stood up vertically, it takes up less space than a gaming console. It’s so compact, in fact, that it can be mounted on a VESA monitor mount. At just 5.51lbs, it won’t rip your monitor apart, either.

The Vortex G25 is outfitted with Intel’s 10th generation “Coffee Lake” CPUs. Users can choose from the Core i7-8700 or the Core i5-8400. Graphics options include either an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 or a GeForce GTX 1060. All [...]

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October 9, 2017

SilverStone Launches SST-MS09C External M.2 SSD Enclosure

SilverStone has always been on the forefront of introducing some very unique, but awesome products and their new SST-MS09C is definitely among those products.

The SilverStone SST-MS09C is an all-aluminum external M.2 SATA SSD enclosure that appears to be a flash drive from the outside and except it doesn’t actually have a drive pre-installed. Instead, the SST-MS09C allows you to purchase your own M.2 2280 SATA drive and install it to use as a flash drive. Bridging the drive is an VIA Labs VL715 controller which is able to interface SATA 6Gb/s with USB 3.1 Gen 2 to prevent any interface bottlenecking.

For FMS 2017, Seagate made a slew of new announcements including a new 64TB NVMe PCIe SSD, updates to the Nytro SSD lineup, a new RealStor storage appliance, and Nytro Q-Boost technology.

When Seagate announced their 60TB SAS SSD last year, it was an impressive feat however, Seagate and its partners quickly realized that there were limited use cases for the SSD. The capacity was simply too large for the relatively performance limited SAS interface.

For 2017, Seagate went back to the drawing board and announced a new 64TB NVMe SSD which is simply a full height, half-length form factor add-in card containing eight M.2 22110 PCIe Gen 3 x4 SSDs.

For FMS 2017, Samsung shared several new releases along with its SSD/NAND flash roadmap for the coming years. Among the new releases include Samsung’s 96-Layer QLC (Quad Level Cell) NAND and a few new enterprise SSDs.

64-Layer 3D V-NAND Transition

Samsung is already transitioning its entire line of products to utilize 4th Generation 64-layer 3D V-NAND. Their 64-Layer 3D V-NAND has been in mass production since June of this year and promises to be 30% faster, 30% more power efficient, and 20% more reliable than previous generation 48-layer 3D V-NAND.

This could potentially mean that Samsung’s successor to the 960 Pro and 960 Evo [...]

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August 5, 2017

PNY Unveils Prevail Pro Mobile Workstation at SIGGRAPH 2017

At SIGGRAPH 2017, PNY announced that they’ll soon be jumping into the mobile workstation market with their latest PNY Prevail Pro P3000 and Prevail Pro P4000 mobile workstations.

The new mobile workstations which are just 0.78-inches thin and weigh in at just 4.8Lbs, feature up to a 15.6-inch 4K UHD(3840×2160) display, an Intel Core i7-7700HQ processor, up to 32GB of DDR4 2400MHz RAM, and Nvidia’s Quadro Mobile P3000 for the Prevail Pro P3000 and the Quadro Mobile P4000 (Max-Q) for the Prevail Pro P4000. Storage options include up to 512GB M.2 NVMe PCIe SSDs and up to a 2TB HDD.

To meet the capacity and performance demands of the rapidly developing IoT industry, Toshiba is introducing the BG3 SDD, a tiny, single-package SSD for thinner, more reliable mobile and embedded devices.

As the successor to the BG2, the BG3 uses Toshiba’s 64-layer TLC NAND for higher storage density per drive. It also features a DRAM-less design for better power consumption, lower cost, and a smaller footprint.

Utilizing two PCIe 3.0 lanes and Toshiba’s in-house controller, the BG3 can achieve sequential read/write speeds of up to 1,520MB/840MB/s respectively. The BG3 also has an SLC caching feature which can boost performance when the drive [...]

Dell announced a massive refresh of its Precision line of workstations at SIGGRAPH 2017, marking the first refresh of the Precision lineup in five years.

Since it’s the 20 year anniversary for Dell’s workstation business, it’s only fitting to talk about Dell’s first workstation and to see how far they’ve come in the 20 years. Dell’s first workstation was the WorkStation 400, which came in a beige box packed with either one or two Intel Penium II processors running at either 266 MHz, 300 MHz or 333 MHz. The system took as much as 512 MB of RAM and ran Windows NT. In 1997, this was absolutely cutting edge [...]

At a special event at SIGGRAPH 2017, Dell revealed the Precision 5520 mobile workstation, commemorating 20 years of Dell Precision workstations.

Crafted in a beautiful brushed aluminum finish, the Dell Precision 5520 mobile workstation is according to Dell the thinnest and lightest 15-inch mobile workstation on the market. The laptop features a thickness of just 0.66-inches at its thickest point and a weight of just under 4lbs for the fully loaded unit.

What do you get in such a compact package? Well, you get a choice between the Intel Core i7-7820HQ or the Intel Xeon E3-1505M v6, up to 32GB of DDR4, Nvidia Quadro M1200 graphics and up to 1TB M.2 PCIe [...]